In the bitter 2ºF (–17ºC) chill of morning over the Green Mountains in the Ludlow area of Vermont, US, Andrea Anthony (Member 53,236) spotted a pair of parhelia, or sun dogs, glimmering on either side of the rising Sun. These are bright spots of light with reddish edges that can appear as the sunlight refracts through prism-like ice crystals in the shape of tiny hexagonal plates.

Often, parhelia are produced by ice crystals up in high-level Cirrus or Cirrostratus clouds, but Andrea’s sun dogs were born much closer to home. The morning light was shining through a ground-level mist of glittering ice crystals known as diamond dust. You can see evidence of this in the out-of-focus sparkles captured in the middle of her image.

The glitters result from the gentle wobble of the ice crystals as they fall through the still air like autumn leaves. This same wobble has the effect of stretching out the parhelia into golden vertical beams.